Director, Engineering & Strategy
Tom Barber
Founder of Concept to Cloud. Ten years at NASA JPL building cloud platforms for missions that couldn’t afford to fail, including the backend behind PIXLISE on the Mars Perseverance rover. Sets technical and strategic direction across every engagement.
Engineer by training, originally from the UK and now based in Washington, DC. Tom founded Concept to Cloud in 2014 and has spent the decade since shipping engineering across industries, including ten years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
At JPL he worked on the cloud infrastructure and data platforms behind some of NASA’s most ambitious science missions. That included PIXLISE, the analysis platform for the PIXL instrument on the Perseverance rover, where the team cut processing time from thirty hours to ten minutes, work recognised with NASA Software of the Year in 2023.
Before NASA, Tom founded and ran Saiku, a commercial open-source OLAP analytics tool used by teams at Amazon, Samsung, financial institutions and government departments, and served as VP of Apache OODT at the Apache Software Foundation. In 2026 he rebuilt Saiku from the ground up with AI agents.
Today he sets the technical and strategic direction behind every Concept to Cloud engagement, and hosts two podcasts, Concept to Cloud and The AI Briefing, extending the conversation beyond client work.
What Tom does
- Technical due diligence for private equity deals
- Cloud and data platform architecture on AWS, GCP, and Azure
- AI and agentic systems with guardrails for regulated data
- Fractional CTO and technical strategy for scale-ups
- Legacy modernisation without downtime